Private foster care providers have refused to take in at least 372 abused or neglected children so far this year, forcing most to sleep in Texas Child Protective Services offices for a night or more. Of that number, 20 kids spent 39 nights in CPS offices.

No wonder my family grew so large. I've read this article several times this morning.

I'm struggling with both cynicism and disbelief at the moment, outraged at the way children are treated here in America where we have so much freedom and so many opportunities.

Adopting from the foster care system is not as glamorous, for want of better word, as someone like Angelina Jolie flying into a foreign country, donating much needed money to the orphanages, and returning with a beautiful child in her arms.

I've adopted internationally and here from the foster care system. I've experienced both types of adoption. Truly, my heart felt better in Honduras when I witnessed the appalling poverty back in the 1980s, I felt like I was doing something about it, in a very small measure, when I adopted three school age girls. Two have graduated from college; a third is almost finished now. It is very different from adopting from the U.S. foster care system.

It is also prohibitively expensive, not something that I could do often.

It wasn't just for financial reasons though that the rest of my adoptions basically happened in Texas. Since my Honduran daughters made us a Hispanic-majority family, the rest of my adoptions were of Hispanic sibling groups that appeared to be languishing in the foster care system, waiting on an appropriate home study. The waiting kids were older, with issues, large siblings groups, minorities, and two of my sibling groups had disrupted from other adoptive placements.

I have great respect for the Texas CPS workers; I’ve met some dedicated, caring, devoted and enthusiastic workers who’ve moved mountains to get their kids into families. In my work with AAN I still prefer to work with Texas, they know how to get it accomplished. ICPC is a state to state issue, but it is expedited on the Texas end. That’s been my experience.

But these same workers aren’t magicians. They can’t invent families that are willing to go all nitty gritty and jump into the trenches with their sleeves rolled up and all sorts of other necessary clichés that are needed in order to help children who’ve been through Hell.

Texas never sugar-coated my own children’s issues, there was full disclosure, but one can’t know exactly what will explode during adolescence, no amount of psychiatric help can prevent mental illnesses from appearing.

So many parents here who read the Older Child Adoption Blogs do so for the answers that we do not have. I can only share my thoughts and my experiences, what has worked for us and what has not. Blogging also helps me to step back, unravel my own thoughts and to try to figure things out.

This is unglamorous, there is often no gratitude, and sometimes all we have is the inner heart knowledge that we are doing what we are supposed to do with our lives in our attempts to help the children. Believe it or not, that’s usually enough for me, but I do continue to despair over all the waiting children.